The following article is an excerpt from the recently
published book THE FOLLY OF EMPIRE by JOHN B. JUDIS

The United States invaded a distant country to share the blessings of
democracy. But after being welcomed as liberators, U.S. troops encountered a
bloody insurrection. Sound familiar? Don't think Iraq - think the Philippines
and Mexico decades ago. U.S. President George W. Bush and his advisors have
embarked on a historic mission to change the world. Too bad they ignored the
lessons of history.

On October 18, 2003, U.S. President George W. Bush landed in Manila as part of
a six-nation Asian tour. The presidential airplane, Air Force One, was
shepherded into Philippine airspace by F-15 fighter jets due to security
concerns over a possible terrorist attack. Bush's speech to the Philippine
Congress was delayed by what one reporter described as "undulating throngs of
protestors that lined his motorcade route past shantytowns and rows of
shacks." Outside the Philippine House of Representatives, several thousand
more demonstrators greeted Bush, and several Philippine legislators staged a
walkout during his 20-minute address.

In that speech, Bush credited the United States for transforming the
Philippines into a democracy. "America is proud of its part in the great story
of the Filipino people," said Bush. "Together our soldiers liberated the
Philippines from colonial rule." He drew an analogy between the United States'
attempt to create democracy in the Philippines and its effort to create a
democratic Middle East through the invasion and occupation of Iraq. "Democracy
always has skeptics," the president said. "Some say the culture of the Middle
East will not sustain the institutions of democracy. The same doubts were once
expressed about the culture of Asia. These doubts were proven wrong nearly six
decades ago, when the Republic of the Philippines became the first democratic
nation in Asia."

As many Philippine commentators remarked afterward, Bush's rendition of
Philippine-American history bore little relation to fact. True, the U.S. Navy
ousted Spain from the Philippines in the Spanish-American War of 1898. But
instead of creating a Philippine democracy, the McKinley administration, its
confidence inflated by victory in that "splendid little war," annexed the
country and installed a colonial administrator. The United States then waged a
brutal war against the same Philippine independence movement it encouraged to
fight against Spain. The war dragged on for 14 years. Before it ended, about
120,000 U.S. troops were deployed, more than 4,000 were killed, and more than
200,000 Filipino civilians and soldiers were killed. Resentment lingered a
century later during Bush's visit.

As for the Philippines' democracy, the United States can take little credit
for what exists and some blame for what doesn't. The electoral machinery the
United States designed in 1946 provided a democratic veneer beneath which a
handful of families, allied to U.S. investors - and addicted to kickbacks -
controlled the Philippine land, economy, and society. The tenuous system broke
down in 1973 when Philippine politician Ferdinand Marcos had himself declared
president for life. Marcos was finally overthrown in 1986, but even today
Philippine democracy remains more dream than reality. Three months before
Bush's visit, a group of soldiers staged a mutiny that raised fears of a
military coup. With Islamic radicals and communists roaming the countryside,
the Philippines is perhaps the least stable of Asian nations. If the analogy
between the United States' "liberation" of the Philippines and of Iraq holds
true, it will not be to the credit of the Bush administration, but to the
skeptics who charged that the White House undertook the invasion of Baghdad
with its eyes wide shut.

... Prior to the annexation of the Philippines, the United States stood firmly
against countries acquiring overseas colonies, just as American colonists once
opposed Britain's attempt to rule them. But by taking over parts of the
Spanish empire, the United States became the kind of imperial power it once
denounced. It was now vying with Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan
for what future U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt called "the domination of
the world."

Some Americans argued the country needed colonies to bolster its military
power or to find markets for its capital. But proponents of imperialism,
including Protestant missionaries, also viewed overseas expansion through the
prism of the country's evangelical tradition. Through annexation, they
insisted, the United States would transform other nations into communities
that shared America's political and social values and also its religious
beliefs. "Territory sometimes comes to us when we go to war in a holy cause,"
U.S. President William McKinley said of the Philippines in October 1900, "and
whenever it does the banner of liberty will float over it and bring, I trust,
the blessings and benefits to all people." This conviction was echoed by a
prominent historian who would soon become president of Princeton University.
In 1901, Woodrow Wilson wrote in defense of the annexation of the Philippines:
"The East is to be opened and transformed, whether we will or no; the
standards of the West are to be imposed upon it; nations and peoples which
have stood still the centuries through are to be quickened and to be made part
of the universal world of commerce and of ideas which has so steadily been
a-making by the advance of European power from age to age."

The two presidents who discovered that the U.S. experiment with imperialism
wasn't working were, ironically, Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had
been an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. takeover of the Spanish empire.
"[I]f we do our duty aright in the Philippines," he declared in 1899, "we will
add to that national renown which is the highest and finest part of national
life, will greatly benefit the people of the Philippine Islands, and above
all, we will play our part well in the great work of uplifting mankind." Yet,
after Roosevelt became president in 1901, his enthusiasm for overseas
expansion waned.

... Upon becoming president, Wilson boasted that he could "teach the South
American republics to elect good men." After Mexican Gen. Victoriano Huerta
arranged the assassination of the democratically elected President Francisco
Madero and seized power in February 1913, Wilson promised to unseat the
unpopular dictator, using a flimsy pretext to dispatch troops across the
border. But instead of being greeted as liberators, the U.S. forces
encountered stiff resistance and inspired riots and demonstrations, uniting
Huerta with his political opponents. In Mexico City, schoolchildren chanted,
"Death to the Gringos." U.S.-owned stores and businesses in Mexico had to
close. The Mexico City newspaper El Imparcial declared, in a decidedly partial
manner, "The soil of the patria is defiled by foreign invasion! We may die,
but let us kill!" Wilson learned the hard way that attempts to instill
U.S.-style constitutional democracy and capitalism through force were destined
to fail.

Wilson drew even more dramatic conclusions about imperialism from the outbreak
of the First World War. Like Roosevelt, and many European leaders, Wilson
earnestly believed that the rapid spread of imperialism contributed to a
higher, more pacific civilization by bringing not only capitalist industry but
also higher standards of morality and education to formerly barbarous regions.
Sadly, the opposite occurred: The struggle for colonies helped precipitate a
savage war among the imperial powers. The only way to prevent future war,
Wilson concluded, was to dismantle the colonial structure itself. His plan
included self-determination for former colonies, international arms reduction,
an open trading system to discourage economic imperialism, and a commitment to
collective security through international organizations, what is now sometimes
referred to as multilateralism. Wilson never abandoned the evangelical goal of
transforming the world, but he recognized that the United States could not do
it alone, and it could not succeed overnight - alone or with others. Creating
a democratic world could take decades, even centuries, as countries developed
at their own pace and according to their own traditions.

After the First World War, Wilson failed to convince either the other
victorious powers or the U.S. Senate to embrace his plan for a new world
order. During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt resumed Wilson's
attempt to dismantle imperialism. After the war, though, the British and
French refused to give up their holdings, and the Soviet Union restored and
expanded the older czarist empire in Eastern Europe and Southern and Western
Asia. Imperialism endured during the Cold War, but as a subtext of the
struggle between the free world and communism.

... In 1899, Manila's upper classes had assured McKinley that he need not worry
about "nationalist sentiment." Similarly, in 2003, the neoconservatives and
the Iraqi exiles declared that U.S. troops would be welcomed with flowers.

... In trying to bring the Middle East into a democratic 21st century, Bush took
it - and the United States - back to the dark days at the turn of the last
century. Administration officials deeply misunderstood the region and its
history. They viewed the Iraqis under Saddam the same way that Americans once
viewed the Filipinos under the Spanish or the Mexicans under dictator Huerta -
as victims of tyranny who, once freed, would embrace their American conquerors
as liberators.

Bush resolved the contradiction between imperialism and liberation simply by
denying that the United States was capable of acting as an imperial power. He
assumed that by declaring his support for a "democratic Middle East," he had
inoculated Americans against the charge of imperialism. But, of course, the
United States and Britain had always claimed the highest motives in seeking to
dominate other peoples. McKinley had promised to "civilize and Christianize
the Filipinos." What mattered was not expressed motives, but methods; and the
Bush administration in Iraq, like the McKinley administration in the
Philippines, invaded, occupied, and sought to dominate a people they were
claiming to liberate.

Neoconservative intellectuals candidly acknowledge that the United States was
on an imperial mission, but insist, in the words of neoconservative Stanley
Kurtz, that imperialism is "a midwife of democratic self-rule." Yet, in the
Philippines in 1900, South Vietnam in 1961, or Iraq today, imperialism has not
given birth to democracy, but war, and war conducted with a savagery that has
belied the U.S. commitment to Christian civilization or democracy. Abu Ghraib
was not the first time U.S. troops used torture on prisoners; it was rampant
in the Philippines a century ago. Although nothing is inevitable, the imperial
mindset sees the people it seeks to civilize or democratize as inferior and
lends itself to inhumane practices. The British used poison gas in Iraq well
before the idea ever occurred to Saddam Hussein.

... Americans have always believed they have a special role to play in
transforming the world, and their understanding of empire and imperialism has
proven critical to this process. America's founders believed their new nation
would lead primarily by example, but the imperialists of the 1890s believed
the United States could create an empire that would eventually dwarf the rival
European empires. The difference would be that America's empire would reflect
its own special values. Indiana Sen. Albert Beveridge and the Protestant
missionaries advocated "the imperialism of righteousness." God, Beveridge
contended, has made "the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples ... master
organizers of the world. ...He has made us adept in government that we may
administer government among the savage and senile peoples. Were it not for
such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of
all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally
lead in the regeneration of the world."

By the early 20th century, this vision of American empire had faded, as the
United States proved barely capable of retaining its hold over the
Philippines. Wilson didn't merely change U.S. foreign policy; he changed its
underlying millennial framework. Like Beveridge, he believed the United States
was destined to create the Kingdom of God on Earth by actively transforming
the world. But Wilson didn't believe it could be done through a U.S. imperium.
America's special role would consist in creating a community of power that
would dismantle the structure of imperialism and lay the basis for a pacific,
prosperous international system. Wilson's vision earned the support not only
of Americans but of peoples around the world.

As the 21st century dawned, the neoconservatives adopted Wilson's vision of
global democracy, but they sought to achieve it through the unilateral means
associated with Beveridge. They saw the United States as an imperial power
that could transform the world single-handedly. But the neoconservatives and
George W. Bush are likely to learn the same lesson in the early 21st century
that Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson learned in the early 20th century.
Acting on its own, the United States' ability to dominate and transform
remains limited, as the ill-fated mission in Iraq and the reemergence of the
Taliban in Afghanistan already suggest. When the United States goes out alone
in search of monsters to destroy - venturing in terrain upon which imperial
powers have already trod - it can itself become the monster.

This article is comprised of extracts taken from the essay
'Imperial Amnesia' printed in the July/August 2004 issue of Foreign
Policy, journal of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The essay was
adapted from John B. Judis' book Folly of Empire. You can read all of the
essay 'Imperial Amnesia' on the Foreign Policy web site at
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=2582&page=0

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: JOHN B. JUDIS is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace and also senior editor at The New Republic.

THE FOLLY OF EMPIRE

What George W. Bush Could
Learn From Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson